News and Opinions about the Operating System world…

Tux: Modern Olympic Champion

The Olympics are known throughout the world and have been going on for centuries. The first Olympic games were thought to have occurred in the sixth century BC, and it consisted of foot races only. It started as a race for young women to compete for the honor of being a priestess for the goddess, Hera. A second race was run for young men for the right to be a consort for the priestess.

A lot has happened since then.

This year, the Olympic games are being held in London, and champions from all over the world are attending in the hopes of taking home Olympic gold.

One champion there is nothing like the others, and you won’t see in any of the events. It’s Linux.

When the Olympic Games needed a server to host their web page, they chose to rely on the same server that anyone in the world can download free of charge. Linux. The web services are provided by Apache and PHP, the database by MySQL. Like other Olympic competitors, the demands placed on Linux will be high. The website will be responsible for distributing stats for all of the events, receiving their information and making it available to other organizations to broadcast. That includes the event video distribution organization. You know all that information you see on the bottom of your television screen during the broadcast? That will be coming from the Linux server.

Don’t be confused though. There were other runners in the race. The Olympics could have chosen a Microsoft Server, or a traditional Unix server. They could have run their DBs on MSSQL or Oracle, but they didn’t. They chose a LAMP server.

To me, this shows a great deal of faith in the Linux environment. The Olympics chose to use the same software you can download from the Internet free of charge for their mission critical needs, and the world is watching. If Linux stumbles, the world will see. If Linux runs it’s race with speed and grace (which I am pretty sure it will), it will be a great victory for Linux.